GCC 4.6 Brings Intel Optimizations, AVX, Improvements

While no release announcement has yet to hit the wire, GCC 4.6.0 is now available. Uploaded to the GCC mirrors yesterday afternoon was the GCC 4.6.0 final source packages, right ahead of their planned release which is/was expected to be around Monday. It was only earlier this month that the first release candidate arrives, but this is one rather nice update to the GNU Compiler Collection.

When it comes to GCC 4.6 and hardware, on the embedded front this open-source compiler now supports the ARM Cortex-M4, basic support for the Cortex-A15, and various other ARM improvements and optimizations. There's also (finally) Intel Core 2 optimizations for GCC that can be tapped using core2 with the mtune and march options. At the same time there's also optimizations for first-generation Intel Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 CPUs using the corei7 tuning option.